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So Tweets Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive spirited away by Egyptian secret service agents and kept blindfolded for twelve days, only to reappear as a hero in the last moments before Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Nothing against the man, and I’m sure he has the best of intentions for his fellow citizens, but this is more than a little troubling.

Egyptians in the know, such as Gigi Ibrahim, are already taking Ghonim to task, and good thing, too. (See her and others in conversation on Al Jazeera English, featured here, under the appropriate title: “Owning Egypt’s Revolution.”) It is the people, broadly defined, from across the wide spectrum of Egyptian society, who should decide Egypt’s fate, not the international business community, no matter who its official or unofficial representatives may be.

And with that, how about we give the whole Twitter/Facebook/Google/YouTube—choose your multinational social media brand—Revolution speak a break. It’s a people’s revolution, or none at all.

Egypt and the Dialectic of Freedom

From the introduction to Maxine Greene’s Dialectic of Freedom:

The aim is to find (or create) an authentic public space, that is, one in which diverse human beings can appear before one another as, to quote Hannah Arendt, “the best they know how to be.” Such a space requires the provision of opportunities for the articulation of multiple perspectives in multiple idioms, out of which something common can be brought into being. It requires, as well, a consciousness of the normative as well as the possible: of what ought to be, from a moral and ethical point of view, and what is in the making, what might be in an always open world.

This, for me, is a piece with the enduring and ongoing lesson out of Egypt today. Mubarak steps down, yes. But he wouldn’t have done so if it were not for the people of Egypt, who never, ever stopped thinking about what ought to be, what might be. They have long imagined a world in which Mubarak no longer plays a role, and now they have it. Congratulations. Today, we are all Egyptians.

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Flirting with Revolution: Day 18

I joke, but in a way it’s kind of true: This is my first revolution. I’ve “seen” others on television, read about them in newspapers and magazines: Iran in 2009, Ukraine’s “orange” revolution in 2004, and others going back to the Berlin Wall in 1989. But this is the first time I’ve followed events from day one, and followed them so closely. At home, I split the computer screen between Al Jazeera English and Twitter.

I can’t look away, partly for the fear I’ll miss something. The second-by-second speed at which the news comes in, the stunning images of hundreds of thousands of people packed in Tahrir Square, the tears and drama surrounding the release of Wael Ghonim following twelve days in detention, all of it is riveting. But it’s also that these events are so incredibly inspiring.

So many people, in so many ways, actively, consciously fighting not only against a corrupt regime but also for freedoms and rights we often take for granted here in the West. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I hasten to say that it’s unlikely I ever will—or at least as long as I live out my days in North America. Color me jealous, then. I suppose I am.

Mean City, USA

As reported in this week’s print edition of the Economist, the number of people living below the poverty line in Florida’s Sarasota-Bradenton metropolitan region increased from 9.2% in 2007 to 13.7% in 2009. A remarkable jump, to say the least. Joining the ranks of the homeless are former professionals such as Angie Sammann, a one-time loan officer at a bank, who now lives in the sprawling tent city of Pinellas Hope. “I don’t care if I scrub toilets,” she pleads. “I just want a job.”

So what is to be done about Sammann’s plight, or any of the hundreds of others who share in her predicament? Nothing, apparently, except to cut taxes that fund homeless services like the one operated by Richard Martin, who runs a local charity. As the article goes onto say: 

Much of the money for such schemes comes from different local, state and federal government agencies. But all are tightening the purse strings. The county’s revenues have fallen with property values, so it is cutting back. The state, meanwhile, has cut its grants to Mr Martin’s outfit by 80% over the past four years. Many of the federal grants come courtesy of the stimulus bill of 2009, and so are quickly drying up. When the federal money runs out, says Carolyn Mason, a county commissioner, “that’s pretty much the end of the road.”

Moreover, cities like Sarasota are unsympathetic places for those down on their luck. One of the reasons they grew so fast in the boom years were their low taxes, leaving little money for social programmes. Homelessness is often seen as a threat to migration and tourism. Sarasota city council made several attempts to outlaw sleeping rough, finally finding a formula that passed muster with the courts in 2005. That year it was named the meanest city in America by the National Coalition for the Homeless. All other cities in the top ten were also in the sunbelt.

Not so much a “land of opportunity,” is it, and sadly, I think, a harbinger of things to come in the next few months and years as local and state governments struggle to balance budgets and cut deficits.

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Gathering crowd outside UN headquarters in New York. You don’t have to know Arabic to appreciate the overwhelming sentiment here: Mubarak Must Go!

On Despots and Lattes

The protests in Egypt are inspiring. Change really does seem to be in the air. And this time, it’s for real. But it’s all got me thinking, why are there are no such protests in the America? People are struggling. Unemployment is now inching up to ten percent. The poverty rate is near sixteen percent. Meanwhile, profits on Wall Street are near or above where they were two years ago when the markets crashed. Executive pay and bonuses are topping out at millions, if not billions, of dollars. Where’s the outrage?

Reading Alexis de Tocqueville can be instructive. It turns out that the sort of despotism  democracy breeds, while of a different sort than what you’ll find under a dictatorship, can mitigate the potential for protest. From a chapter in Democracy in America, entitled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”:

Thus I think that the type of oppression which threatens democracies is different from anything there has ever been in the world before. Our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I have myself vainly searched for a word which will exactly express the whole of the conception I have formed. Such old words as “despotism” and “tyranny” do not fit. The thing is new, and as I cannot find a word for it, I must try to define it.

I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see innumerable multitude of men, alike and unequal, constantly circling around in pursuit of petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he still may have a family, one can at least say that he has not got a fatherland.

Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their treatments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thining and all the cares of living?

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial.

A compelling explanation of our current malaise, I think, but also refreshing when compared to what we find today in Egypt and across the Middle East. Perhaps the people there can help renew in us our own faith in (small “d”) democracy here. One can hope. I do.

In Search of Interactions Across a Divide: The Case of Phnom Penh

Popular and scholarly representations of so-called slum communities and neighborhoods tend to depict life in these spaces as somehow cut off from the regular happenings across the city and even the world. Such a “two worlds” approach to poverty and inequality in cities is simplistic at best, and in the case of life in and around the residential complex of “Building” in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, just not so at all, explains AbdouMaliq Simone in an article entitled, “The Politics of the Possible: Making Urban Life in Phnom Penh.” The article is behind a paywall, unfortunately. I quote at length from a relevant subsection: 

An ambiguous legal context coupled with land speculation directly supported at the highest level of the regime led to anticipation that Building’s days were numbered. Still the diverse backgrounds, aspirations and economic capacities of its residents preclude any easy resolution of sporadic negotiations with municipal and national authorities to explore various resettlement schemes. Building’s diversity also provides sufficient ‘corridors’ of connectivity to the rest of the city so that the ruse of development to create a kind of structural claustrophobia, a ‘choking off’, can be practically countered. Among residents there is widespread ambivalence on the wisdom of remaining even if some breathing space is constantly conjured up. The transformation of the built environment across the city produce new imaginaries of what constitutes the signs of really belonging to the city and of what it means to be a ‘normal’ resident. Within the warren of staircases, narrow halls, cramped apartments and densely packed commercial spaces, all rubbing up against each other, the management of everyday transactions and security in Building is labour intensive. There are barely any formal agencies or associations that might lend some predictability or order, yet, disparate agendas and inclinations do manage to interlock through residents’ need and ability to observe what each other does and to render this a matter of conversation, both serious and playful.

The scores of small cafes, inserted in the ground floor openings that had been initially built for flood control and ventilation, are one example of the many local domains for everyday management and the circulation of information. In those mostly frequented by youth, the social scene is usually heterogeneous in terms of who is sitting and talking together. Even though clear demarcations of self-identity are engaged through tattoos, clothing and hairstyles, or ways of speaking, these cafes are not appropriated as the hang-out of any particular group but remain as places for a kind of mutual witnessing and exchange. Thus, youth who are able to attend university or the scores of tertiary-level training programmes across the city will routinely mask where they come from in order not to be shunned; at the same time, they have access to information and points of view that youth who consider themselves chukan (gangsters) and who strongly assert their residential location do not have.

In the cafes then there is great emphasis on an exchange of different interpretations of the rest of the city made possible by these divergent trajectories of engagement. For the chukan do not sit still within Building but also attempt to figure out ways to move across the city, through a field of antagonisms and alliances with other gangs, or by doing the dirty work for syndicates (most often Vietnamese). This exposure generates stories and information that the university students then use as a resource in their zones of operation to communicate a street wisdom that not many of their fellow students possess. At a more concrete level, the cafes and youth become contexts for the advertisement and acquisition of goods and services obtained through theft, bartering, or as the by-product of favours rendered to okhna (‘big men’). For both poor and middle class residents, who struggle to maintain specific levels of consumption, access to such low cost goods are critical. Across the area, this profusion of talk, information exchange, rumours and transactions also take places in the billiard and snooker sheds and over card games.

Building, like Dey Krahom, has been characterized by multiple comings and goings: roughly 40 per cent of the residents in both settlements have never lived anywhere else in Phnom Penh – for low income city dwellers it was crucial to hang on to a place to live at all costs, given the limited land transactions possible for few but the well-to-do. Thus, the social economy of Building continues to find an anchor centred on a wide range of informal trades and individual entrepreneurships, as well as the very identities and particular networks of the performing arts and sex work Household composition, spatial and financial arrangements, gender economies and problem solving outlooks in the sections dominated respectively by sex workers and their associates, and performing artists are markedly different, even if each is regarded with suspicion by the wider society. Even as this divergence provides distinct zones of anchorage, the proximity of these different sections enables them to provide a range of opportunities and supports to each other.

Just think about it!

That subject line and the following was forwarded to me from a friend in India who had it forward to her. Maybe you’ll do the same. 

• We live in a nation where Rice is Rs.40/- per kg and Sim Card is free.

• Pizza reaches home faster than Ambulance and Police.

• Car loan @ 5% but education loan @ 12%.

• Students with 45% get in elite institutions through quota system and those with 90% get out because of merit.

• Where a millionaire can buy a cricket team instead of donating the money to any charity. 2 IPL teams are auctioned at 3300 cores and we are still a poor country where people starve for 2 square meals per day.

• Where the footwear, we wear, are sold in AC showrooms, but vegetables, that we eat, are sold on the footpath.

• Where everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to follow the path to be famous.

• Assembly complex buildings are getting ready within one year while public transport bridges alone take several years to be completed.

• Where we make lemon juices with artificial flavors and dish wash liquids with real lemon.

Indeed. Worth a think, I think.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., back from the grave and shilling for HSBC. Listening to Michael K. Honey speak on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning the image and insinuation strikes me as all the more farcical. Honey has recently edited a book that features speeches by King on labor and economic justice. It would seem to offer a necessary reminder of King’s legacy and message, neither of which appear in line with the pure profit motives of a corporate bank.